


And Here We Are

by SegaBarrett



Category: BoJack Horseman
Genre: Brief Infidelity Mention, Case Fic, F/F, Mall Detectives, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24565813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Diane encounters Pickles, and they go on a mall adventure for the new Ivy Tran novel.
Relationships: Diane Nguyen/Pickles Aplenty
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	And Here We Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [valve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/valve/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Bojack and I make no money from this.

In the last thirty minutes, Diane had really grown to hate the entire being of the Apple Corporation. Not for the normal reasons someone would hate a large corporation, or a simple preference for Microsoft or Linux, but because it seemed like her iBook was on some kind of a telepathic link with her neighbor’s house to where, every time Diane seemed to be actually getting somewhere in her new Ivy Tran novel, her neighbor’s speakers would begin to blast “Still the Same” at full volume.

Therefore, Ivy Tran had been making her way around the mall singing “Still the Same” for the past five-hundred words. 

None of that was specifically helpful, but Diane guessed that that it was better than not writing anything at all- she could always go back and get rid of it later. That was the way that she would get the thing written, even if she had to trim back all of the crap later. And there always seemed to be a lot of crap – hell, she was lucky if she didn’t throw away the entire book as crap at the end of it.

People loved Ivy Tran, and to be honest, Diane still didn’t quite understand why. She didn’t have that… what would she call it? She hated the thought of the phrase “wow factor”, but maybe that was it. Certain people had the spark that set them apart from others, and Ivy had just seemed like a normal teenage girl. Maybe she was unique in the way that she was ordinary. Maybe that was why people found peace in her, in keeping away from their own things that made them stick out like a sore thumb.

She sighed and got up. Maybe putting some tea on would help her to think. It might be Houston now instead of Chicago, but it was still too cold in December to make a run out to the local coffee shop. It seemed pretty corporate, anyway, if she was being honest.

Her book was starting to seem pretty corporate, too. 

She closed the laptop and sighed. What if she went back to… well, she hesitated to call it the scene of the crime, but that was what it was starting to seem like. Maybe walking around the mall for a little bit – well, not the same mall, but a sure-to-be-pretty-similar mall, might help get the creativity flowing. 

It seemed a better plan than anything else she had come up with so far today, and at least it would mean that she wouldn’t have to listen to “Still the Same” over again.

***

Malls seemed to have a certain number of rules that they had to follow. First of all, there needed to be a food court – this was usually centrally located. Some places had two, but that seemed more like it would be just “gilding the lily” as she had heard someone say on some folksy radio program or another. The flagship stores, on the other hand, must be at either end. 

When Diane had been a kid, maybe they had held a sort of magic, and maybe that was the same magic she tried to transfer over to the Ivy Tran books. But after the age of thirty, a Boscov’s is just not that exciting and instead just functions as the place you need to get in and get out of so you can buy a new toaster.

Diane’s first Houston toaster, after all, had burst into flames a few seconds after she had inserted some strawberry Pop-Tarts, and had soured her on not only the brand but everything strawberry for the next few weeks.

Diane let out a breath that she hadn’t realized she had been holding. She released with a start that it had been weeks since the last time she had talked to anyone who was back in LA. That had to be for the best, right? She had decided to leave all of that behind her – to leave that “her” behind her. But that didn’t mean that this hideous set of pillows wouldn’t be something that Bojack would have a snarky comment about, or that she couldn’t picture Mr. Peanutbutter running after one of the… Shakeweights? That a beleaguered salesperson was trying to hock from a stand. The poor guy. He had to know, didn’t he? 

Diane’s mind must have been wandering, after all, because she didn’t see a thing in her peripheral vision before she felt her full body collide with… someone? At first, she wondered if it had been a wall that she had just walked into, but then the wall let out a yelp.

A yelp with a familiar pitch.

A very, very familiar pitch. 

“Oh! Where are you going?” 

Diane pulled back, twitching slightly, and narrowed her gaze. Then her jaw dropped, just a little bit, before she managed to pick it up again. _(“Hey Diane, you about to catch flies, aren’t ya?” ringing in her head.)_

“Diane! Wow! I really can’t believe it!”

Diane let her hand fly to her chin, in an effort to look much less shocked than she was to be looking at Pickles in the middle of a mall in Houston.

“Well, yeah, I can’t believe it either. When did you get here to Houston?”

Diane didn’t see much of a chance for escape. She would just have to keep talking and figure it out then, find cracks in the foundation and slip her way through them. Or maybe the exit was through the back of an Orange Julius – did they even still have those anymore?

“Oh, I just flew down here! I was traveling with Joey Pogo a while but then… you know, things happen, people slip out at the Detroit airport and accidentally get left behind.” 

Diane cocked her head to the side.

“That’s awful! He left you behind in Detroit?”

“Oh, no!” Pickles said and laughed. “…We accidentally left him behind in Detroit. He was in line to get McNuggets when the plane took off and… well it went sour after that.”

Diane blinked.

“It sounds like it. So… why Houston, though, exactly? It seems like there’s… a lot of places you would pick beforehand, if you were… picking places to travel too.” In Diane’s head, she was screaming.

“It’s just a place,” Pickles replied, and Diane, yet again, let out a breath she hadn’t realized that she was holding. Because Pickles was right, after all. It was just a place, and so was this mall. So was anywhere that anyone could end up – so why did everything seem stuck? 

“Do you ever just… go to the mall, Pickles?”

“Well, yeah. I’m here right now.”

Diane blinked.

“Well, I mean, okay. You are. You want to… go somewhere and talk? Or catch up? Or… something?”

Diane had told herself she was not going to get involved in anything to do with LA, and here she was running right back. Maybe she wasn’t as good at leaving things in the past as she wanted to be. And maybe that’s what the Ivy Tran sequel was missing – maybe Ivy didn’t have her own deep, dark secrets.

Well, not that dark. She still wanted it to work for a young adult audience. And, well, Pickles was still a young adult after all.

“Hey, Pickles…” Diane started, “We should go somewhere and talk… catch up. Let me bend your ears about something.”

Pickles’ ear flipped up and flopped over in response.

“I’d love for you to bend my ear.”

***

“What was it like for you growing up?” Diane asked, taking her coffee and pulling it up to her lips, sucking in a swig and then sighing. She was doing a lot of sighing today – more than she felt comfortable with, if she was honest about it. She paused before she could sigh all over again, because that was definitely not what she wanted. She needed to stay in some kind of control over here – she was the writer, and she needed to step back and look at everything in an objective way –

Oh, what the hell. She was about to start shaking like a leaf and didn’t really have any clear idea why. This was going to go spectacularly. 

“Oh, I mean, it was great. I’d wake up every day and play some Candy Crush…”

“I mean, let’s go back to when you were really young. Like… fourteen or so.”

“Well, that was what it was like too! I would get up and play on my phone and I would get on and text my BFF’s…”

Diane bit back another sigh and cocked her head to the side.

“So what did you want? When you were a kid, I mean?”

Surely, Diane figured, getting engaged to Mr. Peanutbutter hadn’t been that dream. It surely hadn’t been for her, back then, after all. It was a little hard to look back and grasp exactly what she had yearned for, though, and maybe it was the same for Pickles.

“I just wanted to be happy, Diane. I mean, all the time. I would sit around sometimes and just… focus on the idea of never being sad again.”

“Can I grab you another cappuccino?” Diane asked, because that kind of focus did seem rather compelling, whether she fully wanted to admit it or not. Self-help gurus would kill for that kind of thing, or pay millions of dollars to try and bottle it to sell it to people who wouldn’t successfully exude it. 

“No, I’m fine. I’m still on this one. It’s got rainbow sprinkles, isn’t that interesting?” Pickles mused. “Why are you asking about my childhood, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Diane replied, then let out a little awkward laugh, because she really was lording the fact that she was older over her, wasn’t she? She was pooh-poohing what was a legitimate question and anyway, really, she could and should tell her and maybe she would even be able to help. Diane, she said to herself, you really have got to stop getting in your own way at any given opportunity. Live a little. “I’m writing a book. A young adult book, another one, and I can’t help feeling like all that was ages ago and miles away.”

“Well, it is, because Diane, honestly, you are kind of old,” Pickles said with a giggle. “But not in a bad way, really. You’re like… Shadow.”

“Shadow?” Diane echoed.

“You know, that old, wise dog in Homeward Bound.”

Diane cocked her head to the side. There were worse things in life than being compared to Shadow from Homeward Bound, after all. He had been a very popular dog actor for quite some time, though last she had heard he was doing reverse mortgage commercials.

Hell, what did it say that Diane was pretty sure she remembered sending him a letter asking for his autograph, once upon a time?

Maybe really she was old.

***

Pickles was excited about a lot of things: for instance, sequins, Joey Pogo (still), social media sites Diane hadn’t even heard of, and a four-second video that was just a guy yelling “these nuts!”. Maybe that was where Diane needed to channel in for Ivy Tran – maybe Ivy Tran was excited about everything, or maybe she was one of those kids who decided that she hated everything because that was cool these days.

Why was Diane feeling like she didn’t know anything about the character she had created herself? She had published a whole book on the girl, she should know the answers to these things. 

Maybe she had been all wrong in the first book and needed to fix it.

It was a good thing that it was already published, so she couldn’t go in and tear the damn thing’s spine out and leave it flopping on the table, to be done over and over and over and over, with Track Changes going wild and flashing red lights all over the place.

“So, what kind of mysteries does Ivy Tran actually solve, Diane?” Pickles asked, appearing to check her image in her own phone. 

“Mall… Mysteries. Well, there’s a main one in the first book, but I guess she’s gone after other mysteries in the past. That’s why she’s… well-known as a mall detective.”

“Well, you’ll need something better than that, won’t you! I mean, like, if I go on insta, then I need to check everyone who, like, follows them. So, like, you would want to see who Ivy helped before and if they have like, mad reviews for her, and like whether they’re happy or whether they wish they went to, you know, a different detective? Like at my restaurant, when they do the review cards and all that and write down like, ‘Pickles is only the best waitress, like, ever.’”

“They wrote that? Using those exact words now?”

“Well, it was something like that. I think they said that they were sure I was never going to give them up or let them down. Something like that.”

Diane chuckled. She wouldn’t be the one to tell her, at least. She didn’t get much of a chance to, anyway. It was a that moment that everything turned pitch black, so much so that Diane couldn’t have really told anyone where she was in that moment.

“Uh…. Hello?” Diane called, trying to let her eyes adjust and failing miserably. “You there, Pickles?”

“Uh, yes I am, Diane! Hello! Let me bring up my phone and…” Pickles let out a grumble. “I could have sworn there was a way to, you know, like make the light come out, but I can’t see it from here. I’m trying to swipe.”

“Let me try.”

“No, no, I’ve got it…”

Diane sighed.

“I literally work with these things all the time – and I just said ‘literally’. Literally. You’re rubbing off on me.”

“I thought I was over here.”

Diane’s laugh came out slightly hysterical this time. Her finger collided, though, with the front of a phone – well, one of theirs, did it really matter whose? And she swiped up, watching as a slight glow illuminated both Diane and Pickles, the latter of whom blinked wildly as the phone lit up.

“So this is actually something that happens? I thought we had controlled the electric grid of something.”

“If by ‘we’ you mean ‘Whitewhale’ well, then… probably.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, I’m trying not to think about that and it would take too long and make me too depressed to explain. Where did everyone else go, anyway?”

“They must be out here somewhere.” Pickles gasped. “Unless they all vanished or something. Maybe this is like that movie The Langoliers.”

Diane blinked – at least she thought she did. Being in the dark, it was a little bit hard to tell. 

“I wouldn’t have expected you to know that particular piece of… cinema, but what can I say, I guess you keep surprising me. Now let’s try and see if we can look around a bit, without breaking our necks that is… Hello? Anybody out there?”

“What happened?” the voice of a man called back. 

“Power outage, I guess?” Diane called back. 

“They need to have a generator!” a woman’s voice exclaimed. “I need to finish returning these packs of college-ruled paper! There’s no way my son can write on these! He’s only 9!”

“Ugh, let’s get out of here,” Diane intoned, using her phone to light the area directly in front of them. “Maybe we can try and get out the front and get in the car. Did you drive here?”

“I hoverboarded,” Pickles replied, and Diane managed not to reply that of course she did, because that would be rude. But it did seem rather in keeping.

“Well, I hope you can find it again,” Diane said, “Where do you park something like that anyway?”

“Oh, just right in front of the,” Pickles replied, just as Diane slammed into and then tripped over something with a distinctly metal feel, directly through her ankle, and let out a grunt as she collided with the tile floor of the mall.

Before Pickles could apologize or Diane could stop her from apologizing – what’s more awkward than a completely stupid apology over something pointless, Diane considered, when people don’t even really ever apologize over the things they should apologize for – the lights flickered, then came back on in a luminous glare that sent a bolt right into her eyes.

It was then that she, that they both in fact, heard the scream.

***

“This is impossible! It’s impossible!”

The man was yelling at the top of his lungs, panicked. He appeared to be a staff member in the Italian restaurant across the aisle in the mall, and by the amount that he was using his hands to illustrate his distress, he also appeared to be Italian.

“What happened?” Pickles asked, her nose prickling with concern. 

“It’s gone! It’s impossible!” the Italian man exclaimed again. “The jewel! It’s gone!”

“The jewel?” Diane inquired, putting a hand on her hair as she blinked, still trying to adjust to the light and finding it rather difficult. “What kind of jewel?”

The man looked at her and glared at first, before his face distorted into another kind of worry. 

“Who are you? Why do you want to know? You’re not from the insurance company, are you?” the man asked. 

“No!” Diane exclaimed. “I’m… definitely not from the insurance company. She looked back at Pickles and then added, “I’m… Ivy Tran, Mall Detective. I have my card around here… Somewhere.” 

She stepped forward, shaking on her feet, and walked over to the man.

“What’s your name?” Diane inquired.

“Carmine Antonelli,” he replied. “And who is your friend?”

“That’s my… assistant. Geraldine… Toast,” Diane said. “We’re here to help. Can you tell us more about what this… jewel is and when it went missing?”

“I don’t know,” Carmine said, hedging slightly. “I don’t want to cause any trouble… Maybe I should just cause the police. I’m sorry to have…”

“If you wanted to call the police, you’d have done it.”

Carmine grumbled and crossed his arms.

“And the fact that you’re grumbling at me means that there’s something that you wouldn’t want to come out if everything was opened to investigation,” Diane said, “Either that, or you just have had a few bad experiences with Officer Meow Meow Fuzzyface, because the way things go he’s probably working down here now.”

“He broke three chairs trying to investigate the last crime here,” Carmine replied. “And the chairs I have now just don’t match anymore. But I’m not sure that I trust someone who calls themselves a ‘mall detective’ is up to the task.”

Diane looked over at Pickles before returning her gaze to Carmine.

“Well, I guess you’re just going to have to have…”

“A brain,” Pickles cut in. “D…Ivy knows what she’s doing, so you should just shut up and listen. Well, first tell us what happened and then shut up and listen.”

***

Somehow, Carmine had toppled into one of the mall’s benches, and he was leaning his head over the side of the table next to it, a clear table that allowed Diane to see through to the silver-tiled floor.

“I came in like I always do, at seven o’clock. Then I was just going through and counting receipts… then the power went out and the next thing I knew, it was just… gone.”

“Is there any particular reason someone would have wanted to take, well, that one in particular?” Diane thought of the kinds of stones superheroes had in shows, the ones that they received all of their powers from. 

“Well,” Carmine began, hedging a bit as he brought his head back up level, before burying it in his hands. “I don’t think it would be very important to anyone else, honestly, but the gem was important to me. It’s the first one I ever got when I decided to become a jeweler, and it was given to me as a gift by my mentor, Dr. Lucas Bark.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that he’s a dog?”

“He is indeed. Do you know him?”

“Never mind. Just keep going. Is there any reason someone would have wanted to steal the jewel? Was there somebody who was… jealous of your relationship with Dr. Bark, maybe?”

“I mean… No, I wouldn’t think so. We were always very close, though. He mentored me for years.”

“Was there anyone else he mentored?”

“Or like, maybe he just had a favorite waitress or something? You know, people can like, form relationships with anyone. Maybe he was snap-chatting someone and, you know, they got like, mad jelly,” Pickles stated.

“I don’t know what any of that just meant,” Carmine replied, throwing his arms up in the air, “But as far as I know his life was his work. He didn’t really interact with that many other people, and he only had… maybe… two other graduate students? I remember their names - Mark and Mike. How could I forget?”

“Okay, that’s good,” Diane said. “Mark and Mike. What can you tell me about the two of them?”

“Um, well, as far as I can recall, Mike is a big short guy and Mark was like… a chubby kind of thin guy.”

“Anything more… you know… distinctive than that?”

“Oooh!” Pickles exclaimed, jumping up.

“Not now, Pickles,” Diane said with a sigh. “He’s thinking. I think.”

“What if we looked them up on insta?” Pickles inquired.

“That’s the… that’s actually a really good idea, Pickles. Maybe seeing a picture of them will jog his memory somehow. Do they have… last names?

“They do,” Carmine replied, “But on, the… Snapface or whatever you want to call it, they are on there as Mark Husband-Material and Mike the Magnificant.”

“That’s… spectacular,” Diane replied. “Pickles, can you pull them up and see if maybe one of them seems like a more… promising kind of suspect?”

“I don’t know,” Pickles replied. “They both seem pretty weird, honestly. Neither of them really screams ‘jewel thief’ to me. They look more like hipsters to me.”

“Would a hipster steal jewels for some reason?” Diane wondered out loud. “Is that a thing now, before it was a thing?”

“I mean, jewel thieves have always been a thing, I think,” Pickles replied.

“Can we get back to figuring out who exactly took my particular jewel?” Carmine asked. “Because it is very important to me, and I would really like to have it back. Also, I don’t think either Mike or Mark is a hipster.”

“Do either of them ever come around the mall?” Diane asked. “We have to figure out who would have… motive and opportunity. Those are the two… uh, components of any crime. My mentor… Sherlock… Snout… taught me that when I was at the Academy.”

“The Mall Detective Academy?” Carmine asked.

“Don’t judge my methods, please.”

“Well, no, I haven’t seen either of them around here. But it’s a big mall, after all – they might have been somewhere else and nobody noticed them… Or I didn’t, at least.”

“So we’re right back where we started?” Diane said with a sigh.

“Not exactly!” Pickles exclaimed. “That Mark guy just checked in at the pizza shop across the mall. So he’s here right now! We should go talk to him and see what he has to say about all this stuff… Before he leaves!”

They borrowed a segway and somehow managed to fit all three of them on it, a feat that Diane was still not entirely sure how they had accomplished, and made their way to Rosario’s Pizza at the other side of the mall, which was located next to Tats or GTFO, the mall’s bustling tattoo parlor.

“Mark!” Diane yelled, walking swiftly up to a guy with short, bushy black hair and glasses, who to be honest really did look like a hipster. Should she flash a badge or something, she wondered, or just let an air of authority she didn’t really feel do the trick? “Are you Mark?” she added a second later, but by the stunned look on his face, she was pretty sure that she had him – what did they call it – dead to rights?

“No, I didn’t even talk to her yesterday! I had nothing to do with it!” Mark exclaimed, and Diane and Pickles both blinked. Behind them, Carmine blinked a little slower as he seemed to be still trying to catch his breath after hopping off of the Segway.

“Uh… Okay. Does this have to do with a missing jewel? Let’s cut right to the chase, then,” Diane said. 

“Yeah. You better fess up!” Pickles exclaimed, shining her cell phone flashlight at him. 

“Can you stop shining that in my eyes? It’s kind of messing with my contacts.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Anyway… missing jewel? Jewel is missing? What? I didn’t even talk to her yesterday, like I said! I thought you were hired by her husband.”

“No!” Diane exclaimed. She sighed. “I’m… Ivy Tran, Mall Detective. This man had a jewel – an object kind of jewel – stolen and he said you might know something about that.” Diane fished a pair of sunglasses out of her bag and slowly put them on. “…Do you?”

“I only know about what Jewel and I feel for each other!”

“And what’s that?” Pickles asked.

“We’re engaged to be married and her husband can’t do anything about it!”

“Okay, I mean… That’s nice,” Diane began.

“That’s so romantic! Are you – what do they call it – star-crossed lovers? Hey, my fiancée cheated on me with her… and she used to be married to him! Do you think maybe Jewel is cheating on you with her husband or… wait, how does that work?”

Diane turned to Pickles and cleared her throat.

“Well, about that… sorry, again. That was a big mistake, for oh so many reasons that we can’t even get into right now. But I’m guessing that this Jewel and the jewel we’re looking for aren’t one and the same. Sounds a little more like a ‘You Were Meant for Me’ kind of – you know what, I’m not even going to use that reference right now.”  
There was the sound of a click-click-clack on the tile and Diane looked up, to see a poodle with two long white fur braids hanging down by her ears and walking in high heels. 

“Hello? What are you talking to my Mark about?” the poodle inquired.

“You must be Jewel,” Diane said. “We have a few questions about where you were when the power went out a few… minutes? Hours? Ago.”

“Well, I was right over by those toys that you pay a quarter to ride,” Jewel said in a very lofty voice. “You wanna look at the security footage and all of that stuff… or what?” 

“You didn’t see anybody hanging around with any kind of, you know, jewelry or anything, right?” 

“I think I did, actually. There’s a woman… she works over in the movie store. Her name is… Carlita, I think? She was saying something weird too, something about… ‘You’ll Believe It When You See It’. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

“I’ll say!” Pickles said. “I usually believe everything before I see it, so that I’m not surprised when I actually see it.” Diane peeked over at Pickles and found her hand walking up and slowly, tentatively, clasping hers. There was something so oddly endearing about her that she wanted to unpack, wanted to nurture, but there would be time enough for that after this was solved. There had to be a moment where they got together to talk later, right? That debrief; that was what she had always called it in her head when she watched those detective shows. The section where everything came together.

So it would come together.

“Okay, so let’s find this… Carlita. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?”

“Well, she’s right over there,” Jewel said, pointing to a woman who was wearing a long, sequined dress and a pair of high-heel boots.

She was holding something up to the light, something that reflected the chandelier’s light back towards where Diane, Pickles, Carmine and Jewel were standing. There was something transfixing about it. 

And there was someone else there, too – the guy who Diane recognized from the pictures as “Mike”, the other hipster.

He was holding up something that was reflecting the light, too, and they were standing together.

“Uh….” Pickles said.

A light appeared between them, and as they all watched, a blue fog descended, morphing into the shape of a… a frog?

“I have come to be with you,” a voice declared, and then the frog hopped off, seemingly in the direction of the food court.

Carlita and Mike both approached Diane, looking at everyone a bit sheepishly.

“Sorry,” Mike said, “We needed the gems. We needed to bring him back. Dr. Bark had accidentally trapped him in there three years ago, when he was doing his dissertation… And we knew that we were the only ones who could let him out.”

“The conditions had to be right,” Carlita chimed in. “There had to be a blackout, and the gems had to be in these exact coordinates… And, well, the stars all aligned and here we are.”

“And here we are,” Diane echoed, looking over at Pickles. “I guess you could say we solved the mystery. Well, sort of. Will you give the gem… gems? Back to Carmine? I think he really has an emotional attachment to them. Or, was that to the frog?”

“I knew not of the frog,” said Carmine, “But I will treasure the gems forevermore.”

The two handed the gems back to Carmine, who brought them to his chest and let out a long sigh.

“Home at last.”

Diane looked over at Pickles.

“I guess our work here is done… huh?”

Pickles smiled.

“I guess. Did you get enough ideas for the next Ivy Tran novel?”

Diane looked at her and reached out her hand again, taking Pickles’ and squeezing it gently. 

“I think so… Well, she'll have a sidekick now, of course.”


End file.
